Well, it came and it went. The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a success given the tough economic times. I spent some time there and saw many a wondrous thing. Technology was the order of the day. There were a few things that really stuck out to me that were offered not by the huge corporations, but by smaller companies that are just trying to get by.

CNET Best of Show

I was a bit disappointed by the CNET Best of Show pick. The Palm Pre may have wow'ed them, but really folks its just a phone and more to the point available by only one carrier (one in question I might add). I might have picked say a fuel cell portable generator that runs on salt water, or the gadget that backs up the information on any cell phone, or the new SD XC cards that can hold 2TB of data. But that's just me. Of course, they yawn at that type of stuff.

Windows 7

I got the chance to play with windows 7 at the show, and while a bit faster than the version of vista that I run on my old beater, what impressed me most about windows 7 is how fast it crashes. Now there was no BSOD which is a great improvement, but the fact that now you have a graphical version of the BSOD doesn't really help. Overall, windows 7 does seem to be an improvement over vista, but it is hard to tell since Microsoft chooses to use the biggest and baddest hardware it can find to make windows 7 run well at the show.

Will there be updates? Sure there will. As we put some of the products we saw at CES to the test we will post our opinions from the geek point of view.

Until then...